Day 6 — H2 Accelerator — Design Thinking & Pricing
Day 6 began with going over a case study on the company called Aardvark. The reason this case study was chosen is because the founders (whilst generously given $300K without an idea) spent a significant amount of time ideating, testing and validating their product. Some of the cool things they did that I am going to try and adopt include:
- Smoke tests — sending emails to customers and seeing which ones were opened and what was clicked so they knew what ideas were good.
- Wizard of Oz — Mechanical Turks — Manually responding to requests to work out what was important at which point code could be written to automate.
- Feedback hacks — getting users to provide feedback on bugs for 15 minutes, then having engineers spend the next 45 minutes fixing them before presenting the resolved solution back to the customer.
There were a few other cool things they did but those are the ones I’d like to try implementing as I go through my own process. Unfortunately or fortunately Aardvark was sold to google in 2010 for $50M and was subsequently shut down in late 2011.
We then moved on to exponentials and the importance of exponential growth over time. As exponential growth in the early stages can hold a lot of disappointment it leads to disruption over time in comparison to linear growth. A good example of this is Uber. Uber originally started out with just Uber Black in San Francisco and experienced linear growth for the last 10 years, compared to Uber X where for the first 5 years did nothing until it grew exponentially and disrupted the market.
Fun fact, with a 1 metre stride, 30 exponential steps will take you 26 trips around the world!
Before lunch we worked on Year 2 (or day 2) of our company. Even though we had no idea what we were doing yesterday it turns out we grew like 1000% and everything was looking up. Pretty exciting! I think we should do okay, unless the pre established variables dictate that year 2 will be more difficult than the first year. Here’s a little snapshot of what it looks like in case I’m not explaining it well.
Lunch was awesome again and today we heard Mike from Main Sequence Ventures speak. The top two takeaways for me based on his learnings was to understand who all the stakeholders are so that you aren’t neglecting anyone and getting a product out to market quicker is better than having the end state and taking much longer for a lot of reasons but particularly because you miss out on the learnings and feedback.
We spent the next few hours moving to the next 3 parts of the Design Thinking method around Ideate, Prototype and Validate. Taking all the feedback from the day before and keeping in mind our problem statement we brainstormed individually what potential solutions could look like, before regrouping and looking for similar patterns to eventually come up with our prototype. We tested it on another group and they tested theirs on us. The cool thing about the whole process, is with the other group’s company I have a very good idea on what it was originally about. However, what they came up with took a concept from the original idea and turned it into something I would personally use and can see having way more traction. My company does get to go through this process with another group in the second half of the week so I can’t wait to see what they come up with for mine.
In the late afternoon we went through Pricing, Market Fit & Competition. Here are the key points:
Pricing
- Competition Based — What do you offer in the competitive landscape. i.e. premium product?
- Willingness to Pay — who is willing to pay for what
- Desire to Pay — can you make people feel happy to pay
- Show Product Value — what does the price get you
Market
Understanding the market from a Top Down and Bottom Up approach.
Top Down
- Understand the size of your industry
- Decide what segment you can access
- How much can you actually access today
Bottom Up
- Work out how many customers in a market
- How many are willing to pay
- How much they are willing to pay
Market Size = 2 x 3
Competition
They touched on the differences of competition at different stages of the company’s growth as well as difference between differentiation and competitive advantage. I think the slide below sums up the best way to articulate everything.

We then spent the last hour putting together a pitch on the idea we have come up with for the company we worked on based on all of the things we have learnt over the two days.
I think I’m starting to move from being totally overwhelmed having no idea where to start to really excited about getting out there and seeing what works.